From March 8, you can get Covid jab at 300 hospitals in Bengaluru

Starting March 8, the number of hospitals in Bengaluru where people can get Covid-19 jabs will go up from the current 26 to 300, BBMP Commissioner N Manjunatha Prasad announced on Wednesday.

By involving more and more private hospitals, the civic body aims to inoculate 60,000 senior citizens in a day under Phase 3 of the Covid vaccination. People aged above 60 and over-45s with co-morbidity are being inoculated under Phase 3. The BBMP is also making efforts to reduce the waiting period for receiving the vaccination at hospitals.

Prasad said: "On the first day, as a trial, we took up 24 hospitals for vaccination and close to 1,060 people got vaccinated. On the second day, we faced glitches in the CoWIN software, but we rectified the issue and vaccinated 3,168 people."

"Today (Wednesday), we have a target of 4,600 people, and by the start of next week, we are planning to scale up to 300 hospitals, including government and private establishments, to make the vaccine easily accessible. All the 141 healthcare centres under the BBMP will be able to provide vaccination from Monday (February 8) onwards," he said.

Also read: Cumulative number of Covid-19 vaccine doses given crosses 1.63 crore: Govt

In addition, all the 107 private hospitals with more than 100 beds each will also be involved in the vaccination process starting next week.

"I am happy to see that many hospitals which have fewer than 100 beds are also proactively showing interest in becoming vaccination hubs. Once all the 300 hospitals start providing vaccination, we will be able to provide vaccination to nearly 60,000 people per day," the BBMP commissioner said.

Along with online registration on the CoWIN portal, people can also go for on-spot registrations by directly walking into the nearest vaccination hub. ASHA and Anganwadi workers will mobilise citizens who can’t access the online registrations in rural areas, and bring them to the primary healthcare centres.

'Involve non-empanelled hospitals'

The Private Hospitals' and Nursing Homes' Association (PHANA) has written to Health Minister K Sudhakar, urging him to bring non-empanelled hospitals into the vaccination fold. Presently, the vaccination programme in the private sector is limited to hospitals empanelled under the Ayushman Bharat-Arogya Karnataka scheme or the Central Government Health Scheme, "which is highly insufficient to reach the target population", PHANA said.

"We request you to allow vaccination in all private hospitals which participated in Covid treatment along with the government. It will prevent senior citizens from travelling to only few hospitals in the city," Dr H M Prasanna, president, PHANA, stated in the letter.